Oh, sleep deprivation, how I've missed you. Is that sentence ever a lie.
I would have been surprised if Arnaud Desplechin's Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale, 2008) had left me cold, I loved Rois et reine (Kings and Queen, 2004) so much; I am still pleased to report I loved this one also. It is legitimately comparable with Bergman's Fanny och Alexander (1982), the original five-hour version—a family epic compressed into the few days around Christmas, but reaching back more than forty years, layered with loose-ended detail and private mythology, both the kind that accumulates around anecdotes and traditions and secrets and feuds and the kind that half-catches off names like Junon, Faunia, Paul Dédalus. The language is full of quotation, from Nietzsche to Georges Bataille to Seamus Heaney, A Midsummer Night's Dream at the opposite pole of the year. There is a ghost in the ordinary sense and an imaginary wolf that we can quite clearly see. Random bursts of Irish folk and avant-garde jazz spike into the soundtrack, the camera is not invisible. Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, Catherine Deneuve; I had never before seen Chiara Mastroianni and she is extraordinary. And while the film is of a piece with its predecessor, narratively and thematically, it is not a retread, so I may hope someday to own both of them. I wish I wrote with half the texture Desplechin films.
Meanwhile, the mail brought my contributor's copy of Mythic Delirium #19, an absolute damnfine issue with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tithenai's Damascus and blue_vervain's mouse-god and nineweaving's shivering man in the moon just to start with—selkies, bird shamans, murdered rivers, Inanna; gas-masks and lunar ash and Marilyn Monroe at world's end. Three of the poems, "Cartomachy," "The Devourer," and "The Plague Hill," are mine. Look, pick up a copy already. time_shark knows his stuff.
I made barbecued ribs for dinner. Way too much of this house needs to be cleaned before my brother and his fiancée arrive tomorrow. A late evening spent with Viking Zen and her husband, drinking ginger tea and watching an episode of The Storyteller and then Unbreakable (2000), was still totally worth it.
I'll remember the other thing in the morning.
I would have been surprised if Arnaud Desplechin's Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale, 2008) had left me cold, I loved Rois et reine (Kings and Queen, 2004) so much; I am still pleased to report I loved this one also. It is legitimately comparable with Bergman's Fanny och Alexander (1982), the original five-hour version—a family epic compressed into the few days around Christmas, but reaching back more than forty years, layered with loose-ended detail and private mythology, both the kind that accumulates around anecdotes and traditions and secrets and feuds and the kind that half-catches off names like Junon, Faunia, Paul Dédalus. The language is full of quotation, from Nietzsche to Georges Bataille to Seamus Heaney, A Midsummer Night's Dream at the opposite pole of the year. There is a ghost in the ordinary sense and an imaginary wolf that we can quite clearly see. Random bursts of Irish folk and avant-garde jazz spike into the soundtrack, the camera is not invisible. Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, Catherine Deneuve; I had never before seen Chiara Mastroianni and she is extraordinary. And while the film is of a piece with its predecessor, narratively and thematically, it is not a retread, so I may hope someday to own both of them. I wish I wrote with half the texture Desplechin films.
Meanwhile, the mail brought my contributor's copy of Mythic Delirium #19, an absolute damnfine issue with
tithenai's Damascus and blue_vervain's mouse-god and nineweaving's shivering man in the moon just to start with—selkies, bird shamans, murdered rivers, Inanna; gas-masks and lunar ash and Marilyn Monroe at world's end. Three of the poems, "Cartomachy," "The Devourer," and "The Plague Hill," are mine. Look, pick up a copy already. time_shark knows his stuff.I made barbecued ribs for dinner. Way too much of this house needs to be cleaned before my brother and his fiancée arrive tomorrow. A late evening spent with Viking Zen and her husband, drinking ginger tea and watching an episode of The Storyteller and then Unbreakable (2000), was still totally worth it.
I'll remember the other thing in the morning.
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